Official Palestinian broadcast media have sharply increased anti-Israeli propaganda in recent days, including explicit and implicit calls for suicide attacks on Israeli civilians and kidnappings of Israeli soldiers.

It was part ofa music video airedtoday (April 22, 2006) on the PBC television networkunder the direct control of Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority leader. The same video had appeared in the past, but had disappeared after protests from Israel and the United States, but it has now returned, and it is not alone.

Voice of Palestine radio, also controlled by Dr. Abbas and his Fatah movement, have resumed regular airing of the song “FelastinArabiyyeh”—Palestine is Arab—which includes specific praise for “martyrs” acting against “the cowardly enemy.”

And the broadcasts of PBC television and VOP radio have for the last month left no doubt who that enemy is. It is Israel, which is increasingly called “al-‘udu al-sihiyouni” (The Zionist Enemy) or “al-kayaan al-sihyouni” (The Zionist Entity) or simply “al-‘udu”—The Enemy.

“The only language the enemy understands is force,” declared several different members of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority cabinet in broadcasts dedicated to “The Day of the Prisoner” in the last three days.

While PLO Chairman Abbas has told Israeli officials and Americanofficials that he is working for the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Palestinian officials appearing before Palestinian audiences say that the Palestinians are entitled to use the “Zionist soldier” [Arabic—al-jundi al-sihyouni] to extricate thousands of convicted Arab terrorists from Israeli jails.

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli towns in the Negev, such as today and yesterday, are ignored in the Palestinian media, while Israeli strikes at the rocket launchers or terrorists trying to infiltrate bombs into Israeli cities are regularly condemned as “aggression,” and the terrorists are lauded as “martyrs” and noble citizens.

“Nine more martyrs reached the heavens in the last 48 hours,” observed Voice of Palestinian radio, referring, in part, to a rocket crew that had attacked the Israeli town of Sderot, destroying a house.

“These are crimes against humanity,” declared Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, the PA Information Minister, in a statement to the foreign press, referring to the Israeli “assassination” of members of the rocket crew in Gaza and armed terrorists in the West Bank towns ofNablus and Jenin.

There are also indications that mosque speeches broadcast by the PA media are turning back to the anti-Semitic themes which regularly appeared during the leadership of Yasser Arafat and the early leadership of Abbas, and it seems there is scant difference between the messages ofAbbas’s Fatah movement and the Hamas movement.

In a mosque speech on March 30, Hamas spokesman IsmailRadwan explicitly called for killing Jews, during a Friday prayer address at the Sheikh Zayad Bin-Sultan mosque in Gaza, citing a Hadith—or oral tradition—attributed to Muhammad, Islam’s founder:

“The Day of Judgment will not arrive until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind the stones and the trees; and each stone or tree will say: Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him; except for the gharqad, which is the tree of the Jews.”.

The upsurge in official Palestinian hate messages against Israelis dovetails with a sharp rise in rocket attacks and attempted suicide bomb attacks against Israeli targets. A Palestinian truck bomb laden with more than 100 kilograms of explosives blew up accidentally in the West Bank town ofQalqilya early this month, after the suicide bomber drove into Tel Aviv and returned for no apparent reason, according to Israeli security officials.

Israeli forces subsequently arrested 19 members of the Hamas movement that was allegedly behind the planned attack.

Israeli Army intelligence reported that during the second half of March there was an increase in the number of rockets fired at Israeli settlements in the western Negev (22 confirmed rocket strikes), following a relative reduction in attacks of the first two weeks of March (12 confirmed rocket impact points).

Dr. Michael Widlanski is a specialist in Arab politics and communication whose doctorate dealt with the Palestinian broadcast media. He is a former reporter, correspondent and editor, respectively, at The New York Times, The Cox Newspapers-Atlanta Constitution, and The Jerusalem Post. He has also served as a special advisor to Israeli delegations to peace talks in 1991-1992 and as Strategic Affairs Advisor to the Ministry of Public Security, editing secret PLO Archives captured in Jerusalem.

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